Anyone can build a castle with sand, but can you build a castle on sand? Artist and photographer Vik Muniz collaborated with MIT researcher Marcelo Coelho to engrave a castle onto a single granule of sand.

Destin over at SmarterEveryDay wanted to take an up-close look at the nanostructure of a butterfly's wing, so he took a few samples to be looked at under a scanning electron microscope. The results are fascinatingly beautiful.

The electron microscope is a fascinating scientific device—it uses an electron beam to illuminate a specimen, magnifying it up to 10 million times. With it, scientists can look deep into the substance of the world that surrounds us—and find another world, very similar to ours.

For the last 60 years, scientists have known that DNA's structure is composed of a spiraling corkscrew. They know this thanks to molecular theory and and an old-time technique called X-ray crystallography, where patterns of dots are converted into an overarching image using mathematics. But now, using an electron…

Up close, spiders look like scary alien creatures ready to devour any mammals who dare cross their mandibles. Up extremely close, however, a spider's skin is richly textured, with spiky hairs that resemble industrial towers rising from the landscape.

Gillette took a step away from the "plaster ads on every surface in the civilized world" school of marketing to do something pretty cool. They rounded up a few doctors of electron microscopy and had them stick a whole ad on a strand of hair.

Here's some tasty-looking hard candy. And here's that same tasty-looking hard candy scanned by an SEM. Tuns out that there's a company offering to stick almost anything under an electron microscope and we can't help but wonder: What to pick?

You are looking at the most powerful electron microscope on Earth. Housed at MacMaster University in Ontario, Canada, the Titan 80-300 Cubed will allow researchers to peer into the workings of molecules and atoms on a scale never before possible. What they find with the ultra microscope could revolutionize material…

What you see above are actually the suckers on the arm of a squid, captured with an electron microscope. The color was added for the obvious effect. The National Science Foundation and the journal Science have announced the winners of the 6th annual International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.…

This creepy monster skull is actually a snapdragon seed pod, magnified by an electron microscope. Just as you'd always suspected, the microscopic world turns out to contain nothing but slimy textures and sinister craggy shapes, judging from Karin Jones' haunting microscopy photos.